miércoles, 30 de agosto de 2017

Day
and night, he went to the gym. And when he wasn’t there, it wasn’t strange to
see him on a swimming pool, playing tennis, kicking footballs on a park or just
jogging around the neighborhood. Jason had been a chubby kid fro ma very young
age and the bullying he suffered in primary school and then high school, made
him start his training. He finished high school from home and once he entered
university, he was an entirely new person. Many of those who had mocked him,
were now envious of him.

Of course, Jason loved that. He really liked
to see the face on the people that had pushed him into lockers or shamed him in
the changing rooms after gym class. He had seen a number of them in his
university and it was always a pleasure to see their faces when they realized
who they were looking at or, even better, who they were talking too. Even the
many girls that mocked him in school were now falling for him left and right,
forgetting their past words directed at him.

He had been called a “pig”, a “hog” and a “chubby
little fag”. Children can be mean, that’s true. And it’s always blamed on the
parents, rightfully so. But Jason had discovered, with time, that all those
people that had mocked him earlier in his life had always been that horrible.
Yes, maybe they learned at home or they picked it up from the television, but
the fact was that they hadn’t outgrown their bullying ways. Even in university,
Jason saw how many were made fun of.

For a while, he tried to help those people
that had been left out by society at large, either because they were fat or
maybe because they were gay. There wasn’t a single minority that was out of
range for those that mocked them. He went to several meetings of college
groups, he held rallies and supported the so-called liberals to help improve
the situation on campus and he even experimented on a private level to fully
realize he was as open and really free as he thought he was.

The first year in college was good but then he
grew annoyed by the crowds, by those who wanted everything to change. They
wanted the world to see itself through their eyes, instead of trying to be part
of the community. He met very angry people and extremists, where he would have
never thought to see any of those. He stopped going to the meeting, supporting
political candidates and even helping shamed people to stand for themselves. It
had become a burden on him and he felt it wasn’t fair to carry someone’s load
when he had so much to process by himself.

He focused in only two things: his studies and
his workout regime. A year before he got his degree, he was able to pay the
rent for a small apartment not so far from home. He had gotten a job at the gym
he worked out and that had given him enough money to get where he wanted to go.
He was to become a real state agent and he would try to be the best at it.
Jason had always loved many of the things related to that job and he was
certain he could get his license in a heartbeat.

He started as a part-time intern in a real
state agency. There, he could get all the necessary experience to get his
license and maybe even get noticed by some of the bigger agencies to get hired
for a full-time job, hopefully being the person that shows people houses and
apartments. That’s what he wanted to do, for a long time. Jason was even
willing to leave the gym regime in order to get his dream job, although he
would still try to workout as much as he could on nights and weekends.

One day, Jason had left for his job from his
tiny apartment. It wasn’t a perfect life, but the liked it a lot. He really
loved to go and learn a little bit everyday. He had learned some architectural
terms, as well as many things an engineer should know about how houses work. He
had even been taught how to properly accommodate furniture in order to secure a
sale. He was really in love with it all, with every single detail. And it
showed. People would often tell him they thought he looked better, somehow more
energetic.

That morning, when he felt on top of the
world, an SUV came roaring through his street. Jason woke up really early, so
he knew it was uncommon for that to happen. Nevertheless, he didn’t looked back
to the noise, as one would have. He was busy thinking about his day, he was
busy being too happy about himself and his achievement. He was to busy to
notice the SUV had veered towards the building and that it was going at full
speed on the pedestrian side of the road.

A neighbor called the ambulance, several
others watched from their windows or from their doors. No one else helped, no
one else said a word. The woman that had found him had lost a husband recently,
so she knew exactly how it felt to lose someone like that, in the blink of an
eye. So she decided to call and help another family not being torn apart. The
ambulance took a bit too long to get there. When he got to the hospital, Jason
had lost a large amount of blood and the doctors where not optimistic. It was
nothing short of a miracle how he recuperated, in a way.

The hardest moment was when he woke up. Jason
knew immediately what had happened. He didn’t have a hazy memory; he didn’t
pretend he didn’t know what was going on. The moment his eyes opened, that
young man knew his legs weren’t working and they might never work again.He touched them softly and, when the nurses
weren’t there, he pounded the hard, in rage. He wanted to die several times
during the course of the next few weeks. Aside from his legs, the rest of his
body was fine.

Well, except for his brain. Because he was
pissed with the world, with life and with everyone that owned a fucking SUV. He
couldn’t understand how people drove drunk. That was what the police had told
him, that a drunken man had being the one that had put him on that hospital
bed. But they could not really prove it because the SUV had never been found as
no surveillance cameras had ever being installed on that street. No neighbor
had seen anything, or so they said.

Jason grew to hate everyone, especially the
days his mother and father came to his house to take him out for some fresh
air. After being the most admired man in his gym, he was no a ghost of his
past. In a way, he was that “chubby fag” again. He hated everyone for being
able to walk and he preferred to be inside, away from others, sheltered from
their laughs and their lives. His was over, so he didn’t really mind about
anything else. As far as he knew, his life had come to an end.

However, a young policewoman had entered the
force recently. She was called Susannah and had freckles all over her face. She
had being bullied at school and now she was a real police office. She
investigated Jason’s accident and, with resilience and intelligence, she was
able to discover that the person that had run over Jason had not being drunk.
Furthermore, he was a former student in the same high school as Jason and also
in the same university. He was called for questioning shortly after.

Months later, he was sent to jail for
attempted murder, as he confessed he had hated Jason from day one in high
school. He hated that people that he deemed “less” could become successful when
others like him, so successful in early life, were now facing the hard reality
of life.

Susannah explained it all to Jason and he
thanked her for giving him back his life. Inspired by her, he went back to the
gym to try and recover his legs. Nothing was lost forever, not his real estate
license, not his legs, nor his will to live. Jason would never again let go.

miércoles, 22 de marzo de 2017

Carmen had always been the most reserved of
the four Duke sisters. Everyone in town knew that family, as they owned almost
everything around those parts. Apparently, the great-grandfather had been the
one to first set foot in the region, before mining teams settled too and the
small town of Golden River was founded. What made them rich, of course, was
gold. The Duke family became rich in a glimpse and now every person in town
felt that family owned them.

Deluded by his power, the leader of the family
had always thought the people of Golden River adored him and his family. But
Barnaby Duke was not loved but despised and I was all a really good acting
scene, as the inhabitants of the small town preferred to avoid conflict that
basically shooting themselves on the foot. It was the Duke family that gave
them the jobs on which they based their survival, so any words against them
wouldn’t be precisely wise. So lies settled in town.

What was worse, Mr. Duke loved to give
speeches every so often: on the first day of spring for example. It didn’t
matter if it was raining like crazy, he made people reunite in the town’s
square and talked for hours about how in Golden River people lived a better
life than in other places. He had a point, as they had never starved or
anything like that. Meanwhile, many other towns in the country were suffering
and had been going through very tough times for at least ten years.

As good as he portrayed himself to be, Barnaby
Duke had instructed the mayor and the police, a group of less than five people,
to stop any outsiders from settling in Golden River. They had to ask it
formally first and the requests were mostly denied. That’s why no one really
knew about what was going on in other places. They were shielded from
everything that way. Gold was the only trade they had and it was done by the
Duke family, so none of the workers had the need to travel beyond the forest.

But even so, people hated the Dukes. They
hated the pompous Barnaby and his stuffy wife Henrietta, who was rarely seen in
town. And of course, his daughters were beyond despised because he exhibited
them around, like prizes, wearing all the best but never letting them interact
with anyone from town. The people despised the girls for perpetuating the wrong
his father had done, paying them miserably. They knew their dresses and
perfumes would have made Golden River a better town. But they decided hate was
the way to go because they had nothing else.

There’s where Carmen comes in. She was the
youngest of her sisters, maybe the most beautiful of them all. Her elder sister
Diana was getting ready to leave town, as she had been promised in marriage to
a rich merchant with whom her father had business with. The man was much older
than her and even so she was beaming with joy, as she was leaving town forever
in order to have, what she thought, was a much better life, filled with
excitement and many things to discover.

Carmen was a bit jealous of her sister but
only because she was leaving town, the first one of the sisters to do so. It
was obvious that they would all leave sooner that later, as they were all
getting close to the marrying age. Diana was sixteen and Colleen was fifteen.
Then Marguerite was fourteen and, finally, Carmen was only thirteen. Few years
under her belt but she was the most adventurous one, always curious about the
world around her. She was the least loved one too, by her father.

Her mother was largely absent. She had not
raised them as such, the job having been assigned to a number of servants. They
were the only family to have nannies and cooks in town, which made people hate
them even more. Nevertheless, those servants loved the girls and had learned to
teach them the things they needed to know in order to be good wives in the
future. But that wasn’t enough for Carmen, who often left the house to walk
around the woods, and even to the mine.

She liked to watch the men coming in and out
of there. They looked different in the morning and then in the afternoon, all
covered in dust and dirt. She also visited the ones that worked in the river,
looking for gold there. She would always walk at a safe distance, because she
was a bit scared of all those men and women. They appeared to be suffering and
she inferred that because of the facial expression they had. She was the first
to learn how much people hated the Dukes.

Not that anyone did anything to her; she just
knew it one day. Her sisters left, with the passing of time. One day, waving
goodbye to Marguerite, she realized how little time she had left there. Her
parents had not chosen a suitor yet but the decision would be announced any day
now. She didn’t wanted marriage or leave Golden River, even if people hated
them. Carmen felt she could help them have a better life, maybe better
conditions at work. She had spent so much time watching and hearing them, that
she thought she knew what was best for them.

Silly as she was, Carmen walked to her father
one day and told him she would like to work with him, handling the family
business. The only answer she got was a slap on the face, one so hard her
father’s ring left a mark on her cheek. He didn’t say a word after hitting her,
calling one of the servants and telling them to lock Carmen in her room. Her
wound was not even taken care of. It was then she realized the hate that people
had against them was justified and she hated herself for who she was.

Alone and locked away, she felt herself sink
into an abyss. The following day it was her mother who visited her. That never
happened, as the woman was always busy trying new clothes and stuff she bought
from the city. She entered the room, visibly having never been there. It seemed
she was going to sit on the bed but, instead, she just said a suitor had been
found and her marriage was settled to happen in just a couple of months. The
man was elderly but extremely wealthy.

That night, a storm broke over the small town.
Rain and wind hit all the houses, making the windows crack and the doors
tremble. Carmen had cried so much that she had fallen asleep as she was, on her
bed. But the storm woke her up in the middle of the night and gave her an idea.
The noise was so strong that no one heard when she broke the window. She
removed almost all of her clothes, to be able to move faster, and just like
that, she jumped outside and ran towards town.

The idea behind what she had done was that
someone there could help her escape her father, maybe giving her a horse to
ride to her freedom. But when she got to the small town, she realized people
were asleep and none was there to help her. Then, she did something very
stupid: assuming no one would notice, she grabbed a horse from a stable and
just tried to ride it. The horse didn’t let that happen and dropped her to the
round. The racket attracted the owners to the scene.

When they realized who the burglar was, their
rage seemed to reach new levels. In their eyes, their owner was mocking them,
sending his daughter to steal from them. So they did the only thing that made
sense to them and that they wanted to do: they killed Carmen Duke.

Soon, an angry mob was formed. They had grown
tired and the intrusion of the Duke girl had been the last hey would take from
the oppressor. So that stormy night, they marched straight to the Duke house
and set it on fire. Everyone inside was killed in the sleep. There were Dukes
no more.

viernes, 17 de febrero de 2017

Out of nowhere, I decided to grab my wallet,
put on my pants and go to the street, to the nearest convenience store I could
find. Only one was opened, some five blocks away from the hotel. I bought two
packs of cigarettes, one pack of gum and a can of beer, just because I felt to.
I paid and went back slowly to the room were I had done something I had never
done before: I had told someone I would be with him always, for the rest of our
mortal lives, forever.

As I entered the room, I tried not to make a
noise. Of course, I didn’t turn on any lights and only put down my small
plastic bag once I had crossed the room and reached the balcony. I thanked God
that it was such a big room in which he was staying, in one of the best and
most beautiful hotels in the vicinity. He would never travel without getting to
rest in a really good place, where everything was according to his very high
standards. He had a reputation to look after.

Thankfully, I didn’t have anything to look
after. I had no reputation and there was no possibility for me to pay for such
a room, not then or now. The balcony had a very nice view of the ocean and the
sound of the waves crashing gently against the rocks soothed my soul. Or maybe
it was the fact that I smoked two or three cigarettes in a couple of minutes. I
hadn’t done that in so long and now, suddenly, I had comeback to an old and
nasty habit that I had been praised for leaving behind.

As the soft warm wind made my hair move
around, I regretted having bought only one can of beer. Then, I remembered that
room had every kind of alcoholic beverage one would like to drink. The only
problem was money but I guessed that he wouldn’t be very mad if I just drank
one of them, as it could last me for the whole night. The can of beer went back
to the plastic bag, empty after I drank it in a couple of minutes. I was
decided to get myself drunk that night.

I went inside, grabbed a bottle of vodka.
Then, I decided to grab an orange juice bottle too, to make myself some nice
little cocktails. I took both bottles to the balcony and used the empty beer
can as a glass. I mixed both liquids there and started drinking, watching the
apparent never-ending blackness that lived just above the ocean. It seemed so
attractive, so beautiful somehow. I kept drinking, slowly, as I thought of the
best way to get down to the beach in the next couple of hours. After all, I
wasn’t going to be sleeping and he wasn’t going to wake up any time soon.

I had gone to that hotel in hopes to find him
but now, I realized I had done exactly what I shouldn’t have. He had been my
only chance of happiness but now I didn’t want to see his face ever again. I
had spent every single coin I had in my bank account to get there, to tell him
I loved him and that I regretted not telling him that earlier. But hearing the
waves, I realized I had done so because I was afraid of being alone, of being a
failure at every single level a human male could be one.

I had nothing to offer him, nothing at all. My
so-called feelings were just angst and fear disguised in a week fabric of love
and devotion. He would notice soon enough that I was empty, devoid of
everything he thought he needed from someone else. Besides, I had no stability,
no money, I did odd jobs to survive and I loved to look at the darkness and
sleep during the day. I wasn’t what was expecting me to be, not even close. I
had lied and lied and now there was no turning back.

When we met, the first time, I was actually
pretending to be someone’s friend in order to crash a party. I had done so with
a friend that wanted to meet this girl, who ended up being his best friend. A
strange coincidence that made us get acquainted. I remember clearly that, in
those moments, he never seemed interested in me at all. I think he didn’t have
any of the veils in front of him then, the ones that had clouded his judgment
when he had decided to go out with me weeks later.

Some may think I give myself to little credit
but that’s not what’s happening here, not at all. What happens is that I don’t
feel anything anymore, for him or for anyone. I actually doubt I ever felt
anything for anyone ever. I guess I cared for some time and maybe I had an
interest but my feelings were never involved in anything. I just played along
and now that game has brought me to a place I have no idea how to get out of.
What do I do now that I’m into so deep? Is it possible to go back to where we
were before?

I don’t think so, just hours ago I told him I
would be with him forever and he cried and told me that’s what he had always
wanted from me. But somehow, I feel that he knows what I really feel and think.
I remember those first looks he gave in that party in which we met. He knew
then who I was and that I couldn’t be trusted with something so important as
his heart. Why does he think that has changed now, especially when we already
tried and failed? Maybe he has a thing for failing, or maybe he’s one of those
people that think they can fix other people.

If that’s the reason, I think he means well
but it would be an uphill battle. I have never changed anything about me. I
have always failed or passed by without getting noticed. He cannot change that,
not even if he wanted to do it with all of his energy and money. Not even power
can change the fact that I am me, whoever that person may be. Yes, it’s sad for
me to admit that there’s no chance for me anymore but I do believe it’s best if
I don’t get my hopes without any good reason.

I decided then to go down to the beach and
walk on sand, which I guess feels nice on your body, unless you enter the water
too. The people working in the hotel don’t see me walking down with my last can
of cocktail, passing the swimming pools and walking into a small but nice
little beach. I walk around, trying not to think anymore but that’s impossible.
My brain cannot stop telling me things, almost yelling them at me as if I
didn’t now them. It’s decided: I’m leaving him and never coming back.

I have no idea how to get back home but I
guess I can always steal some money from him and at least buy a bus ticket back
to my city, back to my little and ugly apartment which I pay cleaning floors
and serving people in awful little restaurants. That’s what a bachelor’s degree
would do for you. Or maybe I could grab some more money and just leave for
another city, a new place in which I can begin again. But the dream dies soon,
because I’m incapable of really dreaming.

I sit down just out of reach from the water.
There’s no more alcohol in my can, which I throw to the ocean. I looked at the
waves, angry with them because they refuse to take me away. I’m angry because
this is not the way thing were suppose to go down like. This is not the life I
should have had. Or I at least I don’t think anyone should have this life in
any way shape or form. It is too cruel and empty, with no rewards and nothing
to look forward to. Empty as the blackness of the sky.

I noticed that I’m walking towards the water,
slowly. It feels kind of warm, which is very nice. When it reaches my waist, I
am tempted to look back to the hotel but I decided not to. There’s not for me
there and there’s no way I’m going back,

I keep on walking until the waves push me
around, hitting me on the face several times, making me tumble and fall to my
knees. Under the surface, my body attempts to swim upwards but my mind decides
to make us swallow a good gulp of water. Better to end it here.

martes, 12 de enero de 2016

It was very annoying, but it was more and
more frequent that, in the middle of the night, he had to wake up to a cramp or
some other time of pain. It would normally be in his feet or legs but sometimes
it was his waist that felt the pain or even his face. He had gone to the doctor
several times and to many different ones but none of them was able to tell him
why that happened. He hated when it was obvious they were inventing what to say
instead of giving him a science based and objective point of view. They just
shot in the dark, trying to get it right.

Many had told him it was the lack of exercise
so he tried to jog in the mornings. Soon, he changed it to the afternoons, and
then the nights. All of this happening in the same week, as he realized he hated
to reorganize his life around such a menial activity. He didn’t understand how
some people dared to say they loved to exercise often and for many hours. He
didn’t tell this to anyone, but for him all those persons in the gyms and the
parks exercising every single hour of the day, were just insane people without
any real talent in them.

Of course, he didn’t tell this to anyone when
he signed on for a year at a big gym near his house. A perky girl showed him
all the machines, explained the courses he could take (as if he was entering
Harvard) and told him about the trainers that helped people there. Some even
had experience in the military, which assured quality but also inspired some
fear. In his first week he avoided the trainers and the courses and the dancing
lessons, in order to focus only in the machines. It was a failure anyway but at
least he wasn’t getting yelled at.

The screams were constant in that place and
everyone behaved as if it was extremely normal that a man build like a house
would scream a bunch of skinny short women about how they couldn’t meet his
extremely bizarre quotas of exercise. The man was clearly deranged somehow,
always screaming and never really doing any exercise himself, only when he
needed to demonstrate something he wanted all of them to do. Even then it was
strange, because he would do the exercise so fast and in such a bizarre way,
none of the women would get it fast and the screaming would ensue.

He wasn’t the only insane one in the place.
For a spinning class, there was a lot of yelling there too. The “teacher” there
was a woman. She was very beautiful and her body was testament to her prowess
in the exercise area but she was another one that yelled a lot. And he could
never hold his laughter when looking at the spinning class because it was
simply ridiculous. That woman yelling others to accelerate on bikes going
nowhere, in a closed room with the concentrated heat that everyone was
releasing, without the refreshing sight of the actual world.

He exercised independently as long as he could
but in every area of that place, there was a man or a woman kind of supervising
that everyone make good use of the machines, normally looking after the
cleanliness of everyone in the gym and to see that everyone was using the machines
in the right way. To him, it was amazing how little sense of humor people in a
gym could have. He saw a young man once trying to do a choreography he had
clearly taken away from the TV on some of the running machines and they simply
expelled them for that because they deemed his behavior “irresponsible” and
“dangerous”.

No one laughed there unless it was
hypocritical laughter or if the person was talking on the phone. Besides that,
the sound that ruled was heavy breathing and the eternal sounds of the machines
and the one of the stupid music the put every single day. Every day it was the
same playlist, from beginning to end and he already knew it by heart. And what
was so annoying about it, is that it was there to make you feel you could
always do more, like the music they put on shops and so on.

Basically, the place was a laboratory, and
every stupid person that paid to be there was a mouse or a hamster forever
turning in their little wheel like an idiot, not ever thinking twice about
anything. It was easy to see how brainwashed some of them are and the scary
thing was that the results they had made them even more prone to stay there and
keep on going and just obsess about the whole thing. He had hated to rearrange
his life around exercise but many others were happy to do it, dedicating even
more and more time per week to what they called “the art of exercise”.

“Horseshit”. That’s what he told his doctor
after a couple of months going to the gym. They did a lot of exams and tests
and it was revealed that the exercise had nothing to do with whatever was
happening to him. The cramps would even get worse some nights and he had slowly
became a person that slept on his chest, as it was impossible to him sleeping
in any other way. His legs always hurt and his body was still as bad as it was
months ago.

When he saw the results of the test, he
decided to quit the gym. He had paid for a year but he didn’t mind “loosing”
that money because in any case he had already paid it and new that the people
in the gym had already spend it in some stupid machine. So he decided to only
exercise in the weekends and on the park and maybe doing something he would
enjoy, for a change. He played football with friends sometimes, or with a
Frisbee or he could even buy a dog and play with him. The possibilities were
endless.

Yes, he wasn’t ripped like those nutbags from
the gym but he started feeling better once he decided to relax about the whole
thing and when he decided to get massages and eat better. All of those
decisions made him happier than going to an enclosed space to run like a
lunatic. Now he enjoyed his life and, even without the killer body, he felt
better and that’s all he ever wanted. He had always been happy with who he was
and had been depressed the whole time being in the gym. With all the pictures
and the trainers and the brainwashing, it was hard not get out of there
thinking “I have to be like all of this people”.

He sometimes saw some of them in the park or
in the street and they always gave him this look of superiority. But the look
wasn’t only at him but at the world around them. For some stupid reason, all of
this toolbags that had once decided to go crazy in the exercise, decided they
were better than the rest of us and the worst thing was that all the media and
the society at large believed that to be true. We have been taken by the balls
by a small group of people and now the prototypes of beauty are radically
different than what they were a hundred years ago and even more than what they
were on the Renaissance or before.

But people can stand up to that and just move
along, living their lives as they may and not thinking every single second
about how they look. He laughed alone when recalling some of the conversations
he had overheard in the gym while in the machines or in the locker room. It has
to be left clear that he didn’t thought they were all stupid but some of them
were such idiots, it was a very difficult thing to ignore. They talked about
sex in a way it was simply funny to hear about it, as if it was an exhibition
of the caliber of a two peacocks showing their feathers to the one female, who
also happened to be ripped like them.

It hadn’t been his thing but he new that some
people liked it and he was fine with it. Even some of his friends told him he
should have at list used his membership the whole year, at least once a week.
But he told them he simply couldn’t stand going there anymore. Seeing the faces
of people that claimed they had fun exercising but were there every day
stressed out because they didn’t lose as much weight as they had planned or
because they wouldn’t meet theirs trainer’s demands. It was a disaster.

He finally decided to buy that dog and it was
the best decision he ever had. Not only he had tons of exercise running after
his furry acquisition, the dog also became his best and most loyal friend. And
that was something exercising like a lunatic couldn’t offer. It couldn’t give
you real feelings, only shallow ones that surfaced because you can’t even think
as you kill yourself on those damned machines.